Director

Screenplay

Cinematography

The last
couple of weeks in August are typically a rough road for movie fans as the
studios use the time to dump the cinematic dregs that they figured were too
weak to survive during either the summer box-office derby or the equally
competitive fall awards season during a period when they might conceivably make
a few bucks off of audiences willing to
sit through anything new at the multiplex. Trust me, films don't get much
dreggier than "No Escape," a dreadful and creepily exploitative
would-be thriller, low-grade trash that it is too silly and stupid to be as offensive as it
frequently comes close to being throughout.

Advertisement

Owen Wilson plays Jack Dwyer, a
down-on-his-luck businessman who hopes to reverse his sagging fortunes by
packing up his entire family—ridiculously patient wife Annie (Lake Bell) and
adorable moppet daughters Lucy and Beaze (Sterling Jerins and Clare Geare)—to
work in the clean water program of some massive American conglomerate in their
outpost in an unnamed Asian city. (Although never identified by name, the film
was shot in Thailand, a fact that probably will not be stressed too heavily in
their Chamber of Commerce videos, though it will probably get heavy play in the
ones produced by neighboring countries.) The family has hardly landed in their
hotel room when things start to go sideways—the television, phone and internet
are out and when Jack ventures out the next morning in search of a newspaper,
he winds up in the middle of a brutal street clash between police and
protesters before barely making it back to the hotel.

As it
turns out, revolutionaries angered over the recent American takeover of their
water plant have murdered the corrupt prime minister, overthrown the
government and are now hell-bent on finding and murdering any and all
foreigners stranded in the chaos. The Dwyers manage to make it to the roof of
their hotel—a favorite of visiting Americans—but they are strafed by gunfire
from a helicopter and are forced to make their escape by leaping to the roof of
the building next door. Now, stuck in a country where they don't speak the language and where
nearly everyone wants to kill them on sight, the Dwyers struggle to stay alive
until they can figure out a way to get out of the country. Helping them from
time to time is Hammond (Pierce Brosnan), a mysterious Brit who always manages
to turn up just when the script requires an improbable rescue.

With its
clunky filmmaking, overt sadism (with the expected shootings, slashings and
burnings augmented by an attempted rape and a little girl being forced at
gunpoint to shoot her own father) and borderline xenophobia, one might assume
that "No Escape" was the latest film from Eli Roth. In fact, it is
the brainchild of fraternal filmmakers John Erick and Drew Dowdle, whose past
collaborations, including the American version of "Quarantine,"
"Devil" and "As Above, So Below," have told stories about
ordinary dopes struggling to escape from a confined space while being menaced
by some terrifying menace or another. "No Escape" may shift their
genre focus from horror to action and the size of the confined space may have
expanded but other than that, the film (which John directed and Drew produced
with the two collaborating on the screenplay) is basically the same. As has
been the case with their previous efforts, the results this time around are
pretty dire—the screenplay is bad boilerplate with the occasional lapse into
outright buffoonery (I have seen comedies that have not inspired the kind of
laughs that resulted at the screening I attended when Jack asks his wife
"You okay" after a particularly hair-raising moment), the characters
we are meant to be rooting for are bores and the action is never especially
exciting—but the way in which it treats its ostensibly serious subject in such
a flip and exploitative manner is far more offensive than anything they have
offered up before.

Even if you can work your way around the
potentially distasteful notion of examining the problems of the Third World
through the eyes of accidentally inconvenienced First Worlders, you still have
to deal with the fact that the film is so uncommitted to its ostensible cause
that it not only neglects to identify the country in which it is set,
presumably so as not to offend any potential ticket-selling market, but refuses
to give any voice (other than "Kill Kill") to the those doing the
revolting, preferring to see them as nothing more than faceless hordes
hell-bent on slaughtering anyone who comes across their path. Then again, it is
perhaps just as well that the screenplay eschews the political aspects for the
most part because the one scene in which they come to the forefront—in which
the Pierce Brosnan character relates the evils of American companies who come
in and seize Third World industries in order to maximize profits—is an
absolute embarrassment that drags the already poky proceeding to a dead halt
from which it never recovers.

Dramatically
inert, unintentionally funny (especially during the largely incompetent usage
of slow-motion photography that borders on parody at times) and almost
pornographically violent at time, "No Escape" is an ugly, ugly film
from which no one emerges completely unscathed. For Wilson, this is a strange
throwback to the days in which he was shoehorned into genre films
(such as "Anaconda," "The Haunting" and "Behind Enemy
Lines") that were uncomfortable fits for his laconic charms and for
Brosnan, this is the latest in a depressingly long string of films in which he
is far superior to the material that he has been given to work with. Why they
would choose to appear in something so pandering, mean-spirited and
manipulative is beyond my ability to compute but for whatever reason, the end
result is that they have landed in one of the most unpleasant films of
the year.

Popular Reviews

Subscribe to our mailing list

Enter Your Email Address

Advertisement

The Ebert Club is our hand-picked selection of content for Ebert fans. You will receive a weekly newsletter full of movie-related tidbits, articles, trailers, even the occasional streamable movie. Club members also get access to our members-only section on RogerEbert.com